The defectors, helped by the US-based Human Rights Foundation (HRF), ultimately want to bring down the regime run by Kim Jong-un from within.
They hope that by providing illicit information to those still in North Korea, they will influence minds and stir up dissatisfaction.
HRF’s chief strategy officer Alex Gladstein said that up to 10,000 flashdrives were successfully smuggled into North Korea as Pyongyang’s relations sharply deteriorated over the past year as Kim continued his nuclear and missile programmes.
Due to the escalating tensions in the region the activists are now hoping to reach a target of 100,000 by the middle of next year.
Mr Galdstein said waging an information war was “the only way to inspire change” adding: “So it’s really like a third way, and this is to liberate minds.
“We’re creating little windows to the outside world so that the North Korean people can make decisions for themselves about what they want to do with their lives.”
He added that the North’s appetite for information had changed significantly recently, from popular films like Titanic and South Korean soap operas to news and documentaries and educational material.
The USB-sticks are smuggled at great risk via towns on China’s border with North Korea, where the black market for goods and information is flourishing.
The group’s “Flashdrives for Freedom” project has already smuggled in 2 million hours worth of footage, and 48m hours of reading material, reaching an estimated 1.1 million North Koreans over the past few years.
Operations focusing on information began in the simplest of ways in 2013, by floating hydrogen balloons filled with DVDs, dollar bills and leaflets from the northern town of Paju across the militarised border.
Balloon projects are ongoing during seasons with favourable winds but the group’s focus has shifted mainly to flashdrives which have dramatically increased the amount of content that can be sent in.
Their approach was implicitly endorsed in November by Thae Yong-ho, once number two at North Korea’s embassy in London until he became the regime’s highest profile defector in 2016.
On a visit to Washington, Mr Thae urged legislators on the House Foreign Affairs Committee to strike the “Achilles heel” of dictator Kim Jong-un by strategically targeting his population with specific information that made them question their terrible living conditions.
By exploiting the increasing penetration of free-market capitalism, North Korean citizens could be encouraged to challenge their brainwashing from infancy that the Kim family were divine rulers protecting them from the outside world, Mr Thae argued.
He said: “We cannot change the policy of terror of the Kim Jong-un regime. But we can educate the North Korean population to stand up by disseminating outside information.”
Evidence of the increasing foreign influence on the secretive regime was borne out in the recent daring defection of a young soldier who was shot multiple times as he ran across the border.
When he woke from life-saving surgery he professed a liking for South Korean girl bands.
While the impact of the information campaign is hard to measure, Mr Gladstein said the group hoped to influence North Korea’s business and military elite to foster change that would ultimately help release the quarter million prisoners languishing in labour camps.
He said: “Given the history of Eastern Europe, I hope that people can think about the potential of information rather than reckless conflict and provocation and totally failed diplomacy.
“There is nothing the government can do with information, they can’t manipulate it. It’s a very powerful thing.”